Abstract:

Studies in higher education have identified learning environment as an important component in students learning experience. Accordingly, several instruments have been used over the years in the measurement of learning environment. There has been however a concern for a discipline-specific learning environment scale for architectural education. The purpose of this study is to assess and further develop a trial version of a learning environment scale obtained from literature using the quantitative approach. Participants in this study were 704 undergraduate and postgraduate architecture students drawn from four universities across the south-south region of Nigeria in West Africa. These universities were; Rivers state university, Port Harcourt; Ambrose Ali University, Ekpoma; University of Uyo, Uyo and Cross Rivers State University of Technology, Calabar. The choice of these universities was deliberate. South-south region is the third region in Nigeria that has the highest number of Universities with nationally recognised programmes of architecture but with the least of such studies carried out on it. The instrument was subjected to face and content validity by experts and a pilot study respectively. The structural validity of the instrument was examined using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with the internal consistency of the instrument assessed using Cronbach alpha. Students were rated on a five-point likert scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). The analysis reduced the initial 36 items of the instrument to 23 items with four factors. These were; quality teaching with a variance of 26.49 % and alpha reliability of 0.82, student collaborative learning with a variance of 9.65 % and alpha reliability of 0.82, academic organisation with the variance of 6.70% and alpha reliability of 0.66 and, shared control with a variance of 5.68 and alpha reliability of 0.54. This result revealed an instrument that architectural educators could use as a document for curriculum development.

Keywords:

Learning environment, Measuring instrument, Architectural education.